Where does your pitch go wrong?

I have seen hundreds, maybe even thousands of company pitches coming across my desk. Each has their strengths and weaknesses. Here are some stereotypes:

• An overload of scientific data hides the brilliance of a invention (often in the healthcare field)
• A very straightforward story of an Internet startup is perfectly clear, but somehow looks very amateurish, making the team look amateurish too.
• Super long-winded description of the what this technology is going to do, without any substance on how it is going to be solved, and who is going to solve it by the 3 months time frame put in the presentation
• Feature/benefit overload, making the audience doubt whether there is any distinctive benefit at all
• Failure to explain what the brilliant idea actually is/does
• Buzzword overload: "these people must be lacking substance of they need all that padding"
• Default Microsoft Office color scheme
• "Holy Grail" type of ideas, we will combine this, this, this, this, this, and this to stitch together the ultimate offer (we only do the stitching though)
• Step 1 of the action plan: hire someone who is actually going to do the work
• We started in 2003, then in 2005 we added, then in 2006 this happened, then in 2010 we hired, etc.
• Let's use the one dollar shave club video as an example
• The bulk of the presentation consist of IT architecture diagrams
• "This presentation is almost perfect, you just need to edit the messages a bit"

One of the reasons I like my profession is variety :-)

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